Agree with this.

I live in a newish housing estate in a relatively affluent area of the UK, where every single house has the same cladding, the same colour of roof, the same colour of doors, the same colour and style of windows, the same small patch of grass out the front, and each house is separated by less than 2m.

Walking around the place feels... wrong, hollow, eerie somehow. And yet, many people seem to love this homogeneous kind of place.

Thing is, as you point out, it doesn't have to be this way - it's local planning regulations and NIMBY neighbours that are the problem. Why does every house need to look almost identical? Why do I need permission to paint my front door a different colour?

It's not prefabrication that prevents diversity - it's policy.

You'd think that! You'd think that about something very simple, too, like door hardware. Eastlake (mid 1800's) style hardware has all these beautiful engravings on knobs, plates, hinges, even little places like the mortise plates that are rarely seen. Surely today in the computer age the doorknobs on half-million dollar homes must be more beautiful than these. But they're not.

I can make you an insanely intricate door if you want with a cheap CNC machine. But I don't see a ton of demand for it.

Also, the vast majority of the cost of a half million dollar home is the land.

I think people want this, and manufacturers can supply it.

But it doesn't conform to regulations and/or everyone that has a veto in the planning and permit process.

Indeed, I grew up in a neighborhood that was built during the 50s, and I first developed this sense that I could find my way around anybody's house. Then I realized that all of the houses had identical floor plans but different exterior finishing and were oriented differently. It took me years to figure this out, even though I lived in the middle of it.